This man has restored polluted wetlands in Peru in days; should he be called in Bengaluru?

Lima, Jan 5: Those who are worried over the pollution of lakes in Bengaluru can try to contact this scientist who has done a wonderful job in reviving polluted wetlands in Peru in just 15 days using nanotechnology and has now planned to clean up the famous Lake Titicaca at Peru-Bolivia border and Huacachina lagoon which is located in the middle of a desert in Peru.

According to a report on Spanish news agency Agencia EFE, Marino Morikawa came up with two inventions that helped El Cascajo, an ecosystem covering roughly 50 hectares in Chancay district located north of Lima, to undergo recovery in 2010. Morikawa came up with his own resources and money for the cause.

The idea of restoring El Cascajo came from a call from Morikawa's father who told him that it was there where they went for fishing when the scientist was a child and that it "was in very bad condition," Morikawa told EFE.

Morikawa, who has a degree in environmental science from Tsukuba University in Japan, visited the wetlands and "found a dump for sewage ringed by an illegal landfill where migratory birds fed" and the swamp was covered by water-borne plants.

"Morikawa set out to find a way to decontaminate the wetlands without using chemicals, and his first invention was a micro nanobubbling system, which consists of bubbles 10,000 times smaller than those in a soda beverage and remain in the water between four and eight hours," the EFE report said.

Morikawa later said the bubbles trap and paralyses viruses and bacteria, destroy them as well as make them evaporate. He also designed biological filters with clay to retain the inorganic pollutants that adhere to the surfaces. The results began to show in a fortnight which otherwise would have taken six months to get fulfilled in laboratory. Morikawa gave Nature its due saying he only gave it a boost to speed up the recovery process.

The wetlands were soon populated by migratory birds that used to throng El Cascajo earlier while flying from Canada to Patagonia.

Morikawa then helped recovery of 30 habitats around the world and now eyes recovery of Lake Titicaca, the largest lake in South America located at a height of over 13,000 feet above the sea level.